July 18, 2011

This week my time was exclusively dedicated to SPAW tasks.
I pursued the data collection on the other Jamaican MPAs for the CaMPAM database (Palisadoes-Port Royal Protected Area, Unity Hall Marine Park, Priory Marine Park, Port Maria Marine Park, Middle Morant Cay Nr/SciR Nature Reserve, Discovery Bay Marine Park and Bogue Lagoon Fisheries Sanctuary). As asked by Emma Doyle (Project Manager for the WIDECAST and the GCFI), I also provided an updated list of Jamaica MPAs with their GPS coordinates to launch the CaMPAM database.

However, I had to interrupt that task because, since a new agreement had been signed, Christine O’Sullivan (Programme Assistant SPAW) asked me to update the Excel spreadsheet on the UNEP-RCDR Agreement and to do a list of all agreements’ outstanding deadlines (July-August-September) to contact the partners concerned by outstanding deadlines.
Alessandra Vanzella-Khouri (Programme Officer for SPAW) also reviewed the article for the SPAW website I had written and asked me to edit it (provide more information and web links on some paragraphs).

Challenges faced: Very little information can be found on Google on some of the MPAs, especially those which have not been designated yet. I also experienced some difficulties to find the GPS coordinates of the MPAs because my computer is not allowed to download Google Earth.

Lessons learnt: I learnt how to find the GPS coordinates of a place when we have its latitude and longitude using Google maps.